Another patch fall down, go boom.

[Phred]

Rationalize for the win.  Do you truly believe anything you just said or do you just like the crack? So the game magically becomes unfun with this change?  All of the sudden fun combat becomes unfun when the mobs in a certain level range aren't worth the effort?  Can you draw me a flowchart, you lost me somewhere.

Even though I'm relatively new to the game, I see what he is saying. It's the difference between a challenge and stupidly impossible. The current setup, which even the devs have admitted went too far, means that any more over 4 levels to you is basically a study in frustration to fight. You will miss 80% of the time. IMO, misses are the worst idea in these kinds of games, nothing is as frustrating as seeing a string of 5-10 misses. Much better to at least allow more minimum damage hits than a ton of misses.

Another thing that seems to have been majorly broken by the change was group friendlyness. As it currently stands, instead of inviting anyone in a 5 level range, and having fun with a large group (which was never the most efficient way to level, just the most fun for a lot of people) now if you go outside 2 levels the lower level members of your group either have to be sidekicked or are feeling useless because they can't hit the mobs.

For the folks doing missions in large teams, the game has largely remained the same.  This game isn't built around the powergamer duo power squads. Sorry, it just isn't.

See above for why this is not true

Really, if you're so upset, vote with your wallet. If not, really, shut the cock holster and move on.  We can get this from the genpop boards if we feel like making our retinas beg for mercy.

Ah, love it or leave it, even when the devs have admitted what he's bitching about went too far.

As to the taunt nerf, it seems again the devs double nerfed the problem. First they extended the timer so burns couldn't be stacked up, the only reason the burn tankers were doing the damage they were, then they also nerfed provoke, which was what allowed burn tankers to keep the mobs centered on the burn area. Don't you think it would have been more reasonable to nerf the damage done by burn, put it on test, then see if they needed an additional nerf to a skill used by many other than burn tankers?

The problem with the tanker line taunt is it's single target. And frankly, targetting with the mouse in CoH is pretty miserably done. If a debuffer or sloppy nuker draws agro from multiple mobs, an ae targetted taunt can allow the tanker to have a chance of saving them. If you have to try to click each one individually, good luck getting them all off before the low hp AT is killed. Most tankers, amazingly enough, feel bad when someone dies when they can't taunt mobs off them, so it is frustrating when a useful tool is taken away from them because one class needed toning down in their ability to solo by abusing that skill.

Note that other than soloing burn tankers, none of these changes effect the powerleveling small teams you are accusing him of being on. Small teams don't fight large groups of mobs, it's inefficient. If you're melee, 3-5 even or slightly higher mobs are the best experience, any higher you hit the already existing experience cap and experience is dropped on the floor. If you are blasters, large groups of blues and even greens yeild far better experience per hour with minimal downtime. 2-3 blasters with ae attacks can chew through experience unbelievably fast with little risk this way, because the mobs have less hitpoints and the nukes do full damage.

I guess it's like the difference between vegas and a lottery ticket. In Vegas the house has slightly better odds, in the lottery, it's just a tax on people who can't do math.

[Sable Blaze]

I'm not sure the "for sure" hits and minimum damage would really change anything. EQOA and AO (to a lesser degree) work this way. Fighting high reds is usually a death sentence to the mageling types. Tanks can't really do any damage to them, so it's a slow losing battle. Sure you hit, but for practically nothing.

In AO you HAD to have mobs hitting for mins or you weren't around long. Even then, min damage could come in like an avalanche and you simply couldn't keep up with it. Things were a bit different at 150+, but you still had to keep damage as low as possible. Even then, enforcer mobs with their huge ATK were very difficult to deal with just because their mins were so high (and you usually couldn't keep them at min anyway).

This is just a design call, in my opinion. Either model has the same balancing issues. Whether you miss or whether you hit for mins only. Half a dozen of one, six of another.

As for groups, I find smaller groups of 3-5 just more fun than large groups. Large groups have a certain chaotic charm in missions, but are unwieldy and keeping large pickup groups together is like herding cats. The fascination large groups have with +4 level mobs is another strike against them. Best xp is by volume of mobs killed, not high level individual mobs.

I think we'll see more tuning in the days to come. It's a work in progress. I'm still having fun. I don't make one trick pony toons, and I don't play just one toon in exclusion to all else. I haven't found the changes so far to negatively effect my gameplay. Even if they did for one toon, I have plenty of others. Actually, the wet ice nerf did knock my ice/axe tanker out of play, but I may even come back to her someday. I just don't agonize over this stuff.

[Phred]

I'm not sure the "for sure" hits and minimum damage would really change anything. EQOA and AO (to a lesser degree) work this way. Fighting high reds is usually a death sentence to the mageling types. Tanks can't really do any damage to them, so it's a slow losing battle. Sure you hit, but for practically nothing.
This is just a design call, in my opinion. Either model has the same balancing issues. Whether you miss or whether you hit for mins only. Half a dozen of one, six of another.

My point was it's a perception thing, and leads to player frustration. In AO, I don't recall feeling near as frustrated with a string of low numbers on hits on mobs as I was in EQ on a string of outright misses. If it's a case of easier balancing over enjoyment, it's a lose IMO.

As for groups, I find smaller groups of 3-5 just more fun than large groups. Large groups have a certain chaotic charm in missions, but are unwieldy and keeping large pickup groups together is like herding cats. The fascination large groups have with +4 level mobs is another strike against them. Best xp is by volume of mobs killed, not high level individual mobs.

Another place where balance has been picked over fun IMO. One of the cooler things EQ did in the last few years was admit that ya, if you hunted harder mobs, you should get better rewards, and change experience to reflect it. You already have a harder time hitting them, and they have more hitpoints and hit you harder, so why should your net return on your time be even lower. Making artificial caps on experience gained which encourages grinding on low level mobs is not, IMO, good game design.

I think we'll see more tuning in the days to come. It's a work in progress. I'm still having fun. I don't make one trick pony toons, and I don't play just one toon in exclusion to all else. I haven't found the changes so far to negatively effect my gameplay. Even if they did for one toon, I have plenty of others. Actually, the wet ice nerf did knock my ice/axe tanker out of play, but I may even come back to her someday. I just don't agonize over this stuff.

The only thing that really causes me to agonize over nerfs and game design philosophy that says any time a few power gamers max out their characters faster than the designers intended, the automatic reaction should be to slow it down is that I find when the grind is made tedious, I don't want to spend the time making more than one or two characters. In a game like CoH where so many different combos look interesting, this annoys me. The conventional wisdom among devs seems to be that if it's too easy for people to level, too many people will quit. I'd like to see someone risk making leveling easy enough and character variation wide enough to prove that wrong.

CoH especially, unless they pull of some kind of a miracle with new content and new tricks to hook people, to me seems to have a shelf life limited by design due to it's lack of anything to do once you have leveled a character, assuming you don't burn out on the combat before that. By slowing down experience even more, it just makes it less likely most people will want to grind out another one. At least CoH avoided the DaoC pitfall of making the gameplay such that a character pretty well played the same at 20 as 40 by just making the upgrades repeats of the lower level powers with higher numbers, but not enough to make me want to grind all the levels to get there.

Also, by narrowing the range of things you can fight to one to two levels, they've even made gameplay more bland and repetitive than it had to be.

Other than that, I bought CoH knowing it probably wouldn't keep me interested more than the free month or two, just from discussion here and other places. The only issue I have is that the huge, fun fights I heard raved about here seem to be a thing of the past just as I got the game because hardly anyone is making large groups now.

[Sable Blaze]

The narrow level range is a bit annoying, but I simply don't see how they could expand it with the relativly low cap on maximum levels that there is. Personally, I don't have any problem with people maxing toons as long as they don't piss and moan and the devs attemp to cater to this lot when they get bored. I guess I don't bore easily.

I got plenty frustrated with AO. As an MA all I ever hit for were mins for a long period of time. Sometime after 13.8 (I think) they finally fixed this after a fashion and things got more interesting. I don't like huge miss strings, but I remember EQOA where my SK would hit for continuous single numbers and low teens on mid-red to high-red mobs. Not much better.  

I think mob difficulty and rewards are a dev call. This is what we have. Again, the low level cap seems to dictate that rewards are going to be relativly low with a narrow range. They don't want to see people hitting 40 quickly for some reason, so there it is. I don't much care one way or the other, but I'm fine with things as they are. More tuning is good, too. I'm easy, what can I say?

All MMRPGs have limited shelf life. I can only take so much of either dev stupidity or the community idiocy one tends to find in these games. I've quit EQ three times. Mostly because of the huge balancing issues that seem to crop up after large expansions (Velious, Luclin, now GoD). I quit AO most because of the emphasis on the (stupid) PvP game and what it did to classes in the PvE game. Same with DAOC, though I did spend time on Gaheris, but quit out of outright boredom there. EQOA I quit because the community was made up of mostly complete oxygen thieves. I liked the game, but you couldn't find a decent, reasonably intelligent group to save your life.

I generally go into these game with people I already know from other games, so I have a ready made group. Experience with games like EQ and EQOA leave me very disinclined to pickup group. So I like the small group action. So far CoH meets my requirements for a good time. I still like large group fights, they're usually fun, though as a tanker or scrapper I generally watch the controllers and blasters lockdown and obliterate mobs about as fast as I can engage them. Still, it's the whole mass mayhem thing that's amusing.

Ahh, lastly, the fast leveling high cap model was tried in Diablo 2. I guess you can say it worked rather well there (we'll leave the community out of this). Even there, though, it slowed radically post-80 or so. More levels are the answer to keep an illusion (or even a reality, if the devs can pull it off) of advancement? In D2, most builds were done by the late 60s and anything subsequent was gilding the lilly. Or do we need a rolling cap like FFXI? I think that's actually what the devs in CoH are leaning towards. Only time will tell.

[Phred]

The narrow level range is a bit annoying, but I simply don't see how they could expand it with the relativly low cap on maximum levels that there is.

They already had an experience cap on max experience per kill as your level +3. Lowering that would have had the same effect on slowing levels without affecting gameplay.

Ahh, lastly, the fast leveling high cap model was tried in Diablo 2. I guess you can say it worked rather well there (we'll leave the community out of this). Even there, though, it slowed radically post-80 or so. More levels are the answer to keep an illusion (or even a reality, if the devs can pull it off) of advancement? In D2, most builds were done by the late 60s and anything subsequent was gilding the lilly. Or do we need a rolling cap like FFXI? I think that's actually what the devs in CoH are leaning towards. Only time will tell.

I hadn't thought about D2 mostly because it wasn't a subscription based game. It seems as soon as monthly subscriptions are at stake, slowing leveling becomes a fetish with the developers and the idea that someone who maxed out one character might start a completely different character and continue paying their subscription if the level grind were less tedious is completely inconcievable.

However, you are right, D2 shows people will continue to play, to the point that I've seen one fellow claim to have had 3 different paladin builds alone up to the low 70's. Really, even if they capped the level at 40 for quite a while, adding new content from 1-40 instead of the planned 40-50 of the next content patch, that would only broaden the appeal of making other interesting builds of characters as eventually they'd become like current EQ, which has too much content for one character to see at level appropriate times. EQ had that from the beginning, at least in the 20-40 range, where you could level in multiple zones if you could find people to group somplace other than the unrest/cazic/guk treadmill to 50.

At the moment I see CoH as very shallow, without enough variety to sustain interest through trying multiple builds, and I think it's sad because there are such a large variety of builds that look interesting. Half the people I meet seem to be leveling characters to 10 or 15 then rerolling and trying something else just to see how it plays. However, you only get part of the picture because of the way the powers are spread out.

[Glazius]

For the folks doing missions in large teams, the game has largely remained the same.  This game isn't built around the powergamer duo power squads. Sorry, it just isn't.

Actually, to a large extent, the game _is_ built around smaller groups rather than larger, and the Dread Purple Patch severely decreased the utility of larger groups.

Go into a mission with enough people and the level of the mobs (based around the group leader's level) shoots up by 1. With a full group it's up by 2.  So a group with a 2-level variance (not overcomable by sidekicking) would find its power significantly dropped for the people 2 levels behind. If the mission is 'frontloaded', meaning the mobs at the entrance are 1 level higher than normal, they'll be _5_ levels higher than the now-useless people 2 levels behind. Even a 1-level spread gets rendered largely useless by a frontloaded mission.

Street hunting with larger groups works kinda the same way. I think these are the issues Geko's proposed rollback is designed to address.

I _would_ like to tell the people complaining that because of a four-level disparity they can't hunt with their friends that, if they're not willing to hunt blues and greens with their friends that friendship isn't worth very much. (Of course, the problem there is that, given the 'group dynamics and XP' post, hunting blues and greens might make your friends worse off than they would be without you. Or not. Comprehension is not my friend tonight.)

I think the whole purple thing was addressing what might be a deep-seated refusal of the game engine to work the way the designers wanted it. There was supposed to be an XP cap of +3 levels for a mob. In a group this turned out to mean that you couldn't get XP (post-split) more than a mob of +3 levels. Which meant that large groups of people knocking down select higher-con mobs without much damage variety were advancing at breakneck paces.

I have to wonder if that was a means to force people down a particular playstyle. You could _play_ City of Heroes as a huge, repetitive grind against the same mobs to 40, but that turns it into, well, a huge, repetitive grind against the same mobs.

I forget who said it. Maybe it was someone here, maybe not. But the gist was - if it's possible to pursue a certain goal in a game via a calculated mathematical method, then people will use that method, however joyless and frustrating it may be, because it's 'the best way' to get where they're going.

City of Heroes is like a puzzle game. There's only one thing to do, but the fun is supposed to be in the doing, not necessarily in level prograssion.

I can't see inside the devs' heads, of course. But part of me wonders if the purple patch was an attempt to save the playerbase from itself.

--GF

[Rasix]

Go into a mission with enough people and the level of the mobs (based around the group leader's level) shoots up by 1. With a full group it's up by 2.  So a group with a 2-level variance (not overcomable by sidekicking) would find its power significantly dropped for the people 2 levels behind. If the mission is 'frontloaded', meaning the mobs at the entrance are 1 level higher than normal, they'll be _5_ levels higher than the now-useless people 2 levels behind. Even a 1-level spread gets rendered largely useless by a frontloaded mission.

I think they've called front loading a bug, but I could be wrong. Anyhow, with the changes they've made, they should address the situation above.  

I don't really agree with the changes they've made, but the pissing and moaning is bordering on hysteria.  Hopefully, some rational, sane information like the above is delivered to the devs. But likely all they're seeing are the people complaining because they can only kill 2 purple bosses and a red lt without draining their endurance.

[geldonyetich]

I have to agree that the narrowed level range is really hurting CoH's longevity in the long run.    Geko said he was going to adjust it back a bit, but I don't think he's gotten around to it yet.   Meanwhile, we've gone through a weekend in which no doubt many customers have been hemoraged because of his sloth or technical inability to partially return the level range difference as he was planning.

Really though, our problems predate this.   I think a lot of us hit a dead end at about level 14-22nd in City of Heroes.   It's a fun game for a good while, sure...  however once you hit the 14th-22nd point you hit the bloody treadmill wall.    This wall is perhaps best defined as point in which we realize that things within the game have stopped being meaningful enough to do anything more than grind.  

We've all had our share of pushing the bloody treadmill wall, so at about that point we throw in the towel and once again return to our wait for a MMORPG that feels less like a treadmill and more like an enjoyable endeavor althroughout.   (We got quite a bit further in FFXI, level wise, and I believe this is because the excellently balanced and involving gameplay and a varied, even enthralling, environment.)

So it makes sense that those few us who remain in City of Heroes are mostly those who enjoy playing the Super Hero enough to overlook the treadmill entirely, or else are still hanging on to beliefs that the developers will fix the problem down the line by introducing new features, content, and rebalancings.    

All this sounds like a better theory for why our CoH SG has suffered a drastic downturn in population than my other theory.   That theory being it's summer and many people are enjoying the weather.

[schild]

One of the things that hurts City of Heroes (big time) is the fact there's nothing to do but level. No matter how fun it is, there are absolutely ZERO diversions. While I applaud their ability to release a fun, stable, and content rich game - they really should have waited until they had social things (like headquarters) in before release. By not having things to do OTHER than leveling, people are burning the 'fun' very quickly. Oh well.